Word By Word | phdilettante

It was time to pay attention to the words I was teaching. I was carefully curating lists of words so students could practice the phonics rules I was teaching them. I was getting tired of dredging up the same words over and over: cactus, picnic, dentist, locate, remote, Chippendale, badminton and fig.

In 2003, Sally Shaywitz’s book Overcoming Dyslexia came out. I got my hands on it as soon as I could and read it right away. The book covered a lot of ground, but what I couldn’t get out of my head was one of her conclusions regarding fluency. Students acquire fluency “word by word,” she said….